


Four Hundred

by celli-inkblots (thebeespatella)



Category: Fake News RPF, Pundit RPF (US)
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Angst, Community: fakenews_fanfic, Depression, Explicit Language, M/M, Pining, Self-Harm, Sexual Content, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-06-08
Updated: 2011-06-08
Packaged: 2017-11-07 21:36:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,324
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/435709
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thebeespatella/pseuds/celli-inkblots
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jon is succumbing to a debilitating disease, and one day, Stephen can’t take it anymore. At least, that’s the beginning of this story.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Four Hundred

**Author's Note:**

> At the time I wrote this, I wasn't in the best shape, but writing has helped me through it, fandom and this fic in general. 
> 
> Also it should be noted that this fic is AU, with a few timeline discrepancies and such – set in the modern day, and Jon and Stephen are in the same grade and school. It can almost be read as an original piece, as it draws very little from what we know of their lives.
> 
> PLEASE READ THE TAGS FOR TRIGGER WARNINGS.

 

 

“Jon? Jon?” Stephen calls out to rooms of the house. “Hello?” He walks through the empty dining room, setting the plastic bags on the table. “Hello?”

He finally makes his way to the bedroom, where he sees a lump of off-white coverlet. “Jon?”

Jon turns his head. He has his earphones in. “Hi,” he says.

“Hey.” Stephen sits on the side of the bed.

“I went to my dad’s house. But otherwise…I didn’t get up today,” Jon says quietly, like he knows Stephen will be disappointed even though Stephen never is.

“That’s okay. I brought some food.”

“Thanks.”

“No problem.”

Stephen is halfway out the door when Jon says, “I don’t deserve you”, and then Stephen explodes. In precisely two and four-fifths of a step he’s back at the bed, on Jon’s side this time, and bellows at him: “DON’T YOU EVER SAY THAT.”

Jon’s face remains the same and it only serves to piss Stephen off more. “DON’T EVER FUCKING SAY THAT. EVER. DON’T YOU FUCKING SAY IT. DON’T FUCKING –”

And it continues in that vein for a while, all coital references and anger. But really, this is the end of the story.

\---

It all began with soccer. No, actually, that’s a lie. It began on the day Jon was born, it began on the day he became who he was, it all began in high school, and it began with other people. What that means is that it was all up to circumstance. It all began with the flounders.

Flounders only have eyes on one side of their head, and they’re flat, for the most part. They hide in the sand at the bottom of the sandy shallow end of the ocean, waiting for a snack to come by so that they can jump out and get it. If they swam in circles with their eyes facing inward, it would be pretty funny. They’d only be able to see themselves.

The tedium of everyday living wore on the rock-face of Jon’s integrity, always tempting him. Jump off the cliff. Join the rest of them at the bottom of the sandy pool. Somehow he managed, but he was never anchored.

He was better than them –

But not really –

But this derisive voice inside twining itself with his vocal chords -

Flounder: /flounder/ verb (intrans.). to struggle or stagger helplessly, to struggle; show or feel great confusion.

Until Jon met Stephen, he’d felt lonely. What sucked about knowing Stephen was that he’d never realized the loneliness before, but Stephen highlighted the many many crevasses in his life. They studied together and they talked and they laughed – about themselves, about other people, about things that did matter, and about things that didn’t. They did the crossword together.

The one thing Stephen did not do with Jon was soccer.

Carl Lynam played soccer. Carl Lynam was ugly. Genetic-mutation ugly. Was-your mom-drinking-hydrogen peroxide-when-she-was-pregnant ugly. Not only the way his mouth was a sneer and his voice-box was a snare, not only in his beady eyes and _truly_ disproportionate eyebrows, but also in his enslavement.

Of other people, of course. Carl Lynam the slug sprinkled salt on other people and told them they were slugs, so it _should_ burn. Should burn like a motherfucker.  
And more often than not you got perfectly reasonable people squirming in their own slime on the floor in no time. That’s just how high school is. Homo sapiens to slug in two and a half seconds. Can I get you anything to drink?

“I can’t see the whiteboard. Leibowitz, could I…?”

“Sure, Carl. Here’s yesterday’s worksheet, too.”

“Thanks, man. You’re awesome.”

And slowly with every compliment Jon’s body became flatter and flatter until he’d fit on Lynam’s bookshelf along with all the other volumes he’d picked up and shelved. His eyes moved to one side of his head – conveniently, the side not looking at Lynam.

He found himself in left midfield.

“But Coach,” he said. “Coach, I play right midfield. I’ve played that position for you since freshman year.”

“You’re lucky you’re playing at all, Leibowitz, what with the performance you put in at practice today.”

“ _I’ve never played left –_ ”

“I don’t want to hear your excuses!”

Jon slinked out of the office, only to see Lynam. His buddy. His pal. “I don’t understand.”

Lynam’s eyes were as cold as his answer. “No, _I_ don’t understand. Don’t you want it? Don’t you want to play soccer? Is this just some kind of joke to you? Why do you even show up? Why do you even go to summer practice? Why even train? Why should coach even keep you on the team if you don’t want to play?” He seasoned that slug stew like a pro.

Jon went home with his brain full of these thoughts. Stephen wasn’t there, and Jon didn’t call him. Feeling like a sack of shit wasn’t entirely new to him, but it had never felt so utterly complete.

\---

Sometimes it’s hard to wake up. He opens his eyes but his eyelids are like deserted plains with elephants trekking across. A vulture warps its wicked way across the horizon, but it’s just the sunrise.

What is it going to be today, Leibowitz? Another serving of the concentric circles of a hell that even Dante wonders at?

As he stares at the back of his head, as his alarm clock drills a sound into his brain, he thinks – “What’s the point?”

\---

 

Sometimes it’s hard to sleep. You can lie awake for hours.

There are only colors when your eyes are closed.

Is it insomnia. Is this a question. You can’t explain why you’re still awake as water dilutes ink sky, throwing gray over sharp rooftops. Your eyes trace familiar shadows across my room, they’re like despised relatives. You’re tired, but your eyelashes are wires.

Green geometric numbers with a dead colon.

Four-thirteen.

The reason why your head is round is because it facilitates a racetrack of thought. The secret is that the concentric circles are inside your head, on the interior of your face. When you close your eyes you can see the burnt orange of the track, white lines painted with lanes, wins and failures, four hundred meters of potential. This is your racetrack, where all your thoughts compete to reach your mouth first, where all the thoughts fight to reach your soul first. Where thoughts do laps to help you remember things. You’ve always been good with telephone numbers. The Volga is the longest river in Europe. Dolphins have to think to breathe. Imagine that. Not being able to do anything in your day because you have to get up and remember to breathe. That would be a total mood-killer - if you forgot, that is. Mid-coitus. No pun intended.

This is your personal racetrack. Only you know what goes on in it and what stays out, which thought wins and which thought loses. Your own personal racetrack that you can visit whenever the hell you want. Not bad, for a short kid from Jersey.

\---

He eats with his hands because it makes him feel closer to the shit-crawling animal he is.

Or maybe because he’s lazy. And melodramatic to boot.

“Eat with your fork, Jon.”

Stifling.

“Sit properly, Jon.”

Suffocating.

“How was your day, Jon?”

“I woke up,” he says, and laughs humorlessly. Isn’t that enough. When will it be enough. When will it be too much. It’s not a question.

\---

There is a pulsing creature in the dark and he needs surgery for it but now it has been caged by reality and so Jon clings to the bars and licks them, reveling in the wonderful dirty taste; the iron as it clicks against his teeth.

Sometimes he makes deals with the monster. If _you_ let me wake up, we can wallow later. I will despair after school if _you_ just get me through this class. The great thing about dealing with this Satan is that he scratches itches Jon didn’t even know _you_ had.

\---

 

The college application process is a bitch.

Who are you?

Describe yourself in fifty words.

What do you want out of the college experience?

Distil, process, boil yourself. I want only the center of you, the pit, the rough center. I want the seed. I want your nuts. Give me your nuts on your best silver platter. Wrap your balls in plastic wrap, refrigerate for three days. Thaw slightly and garnish with a sprig of parsley, serve cold. I want your soul. Boil water, and soul, and strain, for any extra parts. Pour, serve at room temperature.

The interviewer from Harvard is an asshole.

When it’s done, Jon feels nothing.

He figures he should have felt relief, but instead he just feels quiet and dull, and it’s not because he refrigerated his balls for three days, although it sure as hell feels like it on January second with the wind blowing through the windows. He can see the parts of himself very, very sharply, like pieces of wedding china thrown to the floor after a disastrous discovery in the bedroom. Like the limbs of a teddy bear ripped off because it wasn’t put away properly. Like the Antarctica in your mother’s voice when she talks about daddy – a massive white continent. No penguins are out. It’s too cold for that.

Maybe he should put the pieces of himself he’s found in jars or something, instead of leaving them out like that.

Soon they’re warming up on the field like everybody else, though, so when he closes his eyes they join the race. The lanes are filled, and there are different heats and so on. They’re organizing themselves, somehow.

\---

Carl Lynam doesn’t really know Jon. Nor do any of his classmates, either.

There are two of him. Persona, person. It’s amazing how much difference one vowel can make, although as a crossword aficionado Jon already knows this. The line between the two grows clearer every day, like a fault line, like a tragedy waiting to happen. The fault line grows and grows – which is funny, because it is always his fault.  
Which is okay, because privately Jon thinks the person isn’t that interesting. His persona often gets him into trouble, but it also gets him liked, and that’s the important thing, because a flounder only has eyes on one side of its head, after all.

“Hey.” Jon sits next to Kara Stratnam. She’s blonde and pretty in a way that makes others resentful rather than appreciative.

“Hi,” she says back. “What’s up?”

“I was just talking to Sakiko. The chubby one.”

She rolls her eyes. “For real?”

“Yeah. You know what she asked me, though?”

“What?”

“She asked me if I had a tampon with me.”

Kara shrieks with laughter, clapping her hands like a goddamn seal. “Seriously? What did you tell her?”

“I was like, ‘Sorry, I’m fresh out’…and I pointed her to the janitor’s closet.”

A few more claps and gaping laughs and Jon might have to toss her a fish. He smirks and walks away. Because isn’t it great to make other people’s lives miserable. Never mind that Jon knows full well that “tampopo” is “dandelion” in Japanese. There’s something sexy to hatred, no doubt about it.

The real question is: which you is sick?

And which you is more real?

\---

What are your plans for this summer?

What do you want out of life?

Who are you going to be when you grow up?

 

\---

Jon used to be able to control himself really, really well. Now he’s a volcano, a magma mess. He wants to attribute it to stress, but it’s something deeper. Something like a knee ligament torn from playing on the left side. Something like stuffing an exchange student’s question with stupidity to cover up the fact that he’s not going up to breathe. Something like computer keys punching out the inside of his head to make words on the inside of his skull that he believes fervently. The salt falls like snow.

They do the crossword together.

50 down: of no value. (Nine letters). Double-you, oh, are, tee, aych, ell, ess, ess. WORTHLESS. 34 across: completely not full. (Five letters). Ee, em, pee, tee, why. EMPTY. 12 down: ‘The gift of _____’ (four letters).

“Fuck this,” Jon says. “This is too easy.”

“What do you want to do?”

“I don’t know. Fuck it.”

“Jon –”

I don’t know.

Fuck it.

I don’t know.

Fuck  
it.

\---

Sometimes Jon thinks about unclassifiable sounds.

There are words.

And there is music.

And then there’s everything else.

The whirr of the fan in the corner. The click of the copy machine as it closes. The rusty scrape of his muscles as his eyes open and close as his mouth tightens around his jaw as he breathes. Stephen’s soft snort when Jon points out a condo cleverly titled “Classy House.” The creak of Sakiko’s chair behind him. The enraged scream of a siren after prey.

And silence. Like a heart in an empty chest. A moment of community between molecules where the Earth is perfectly tilted and still.

Silence.

\---

“Are you all right?” Oh, great. She’s looking at you across the table with _concern_ in her eyes. “You haven’t been yourself lately.”

You put down your fork, look up at her.

“When you talk to me – it’s not the Jon I know. Not the innocent, pure, Jon. Not the Jon who used to love Barney. Not – not – not my son –”

Good Lord, she’s getting herself worked up and teary. Dispassionately, you hand her a tissue.

“You’re not yourself. What’s wrong? What’s wrong, Jon?”

“I told you already.”

Silence.

“I told you already, but you won’t accept it.”

“It’s too…it’s too simple a word, Jon, it doesn’t –”

“So what do you think is happening?”

She’s quiet for a time, clasping her hands together over the table and not looking you in the eye. “I think you’re going through a lot of changes. Fundamental, big changes. You’re intimidated, and it’s…it can be overwhelming. So you’re feeling a bit down, you’re…”

You cross your arms. “I’m?” you prompt.

“It’s natural. It’s part of a metamorphosis!”

Ugh. Not the butterfly comparisons.

“You’re shifting into adulthood, and in this tumultuous time…you’re just…”

“Why can’t you just _fucking_ accept –”

She’s right she’s right she’s right you know you’ve never spoken to your mother oh your mother your mother this way you failure bad son failure –

“– that I’m SICK,” you yell at her. “That this is NOT NORMAL. That this is happening in YOUR PERFECT HOUSE.”

It’s welling. Hot, heavy, glorious sludge. Rage. The only emotion you’ve felt for a while. It burns like kerosene, erasing civilization at four hundred and fifty-one degrees Fahrenheit. He knows nothing in his anger.

“We should see a professional.”

“Oh, because that is a great fucking solution. Go to the doctor! He’ll solve everything! I won’t hate myself anymore. Why can’t YOU just -”

“It was a mistake.”

“What part of all this, exactly?”

The part where you were born, dipshit.

“When you spoke to the school counselor, and she told you she was amazed you could still function despite…that says so much to me, Jon.” She sighs, and looks up, eyes bright with tears, and to your shame, you feel tears prickling your eyes, welling in tear ducts like your resentment. “It just tells me that you’re just getting ready for the future, it’s not…it’s not…you know. It’s…it’s too simple a word.”

“You can’t even say the _word_.”

“Yes, I can –”

“Say it.”

Say it. Say it. Say it. Like an echo like a dark murmur like a pang of birthing pain.

Silence.

\---

Sometimes Jon wonders about pain pills. How do they know exactly where you’re hurting? How come all your nerves don’t go numb? Why is it that it can target just the right muscle, just the right cramp? And why is it that even if you can’t feel anything at all, you still feel pain? Why doesn’t a pill fix everything?

\---

Seeing Stephen is a joy and a curse. For a short time, the world is normal with him. You walk around your neighborhood, making up stories for the men and women and children that walk past, but Stephen’s favorites are the dogs, in their little bonnets and sweaters.

They pass a dignified dachshund, attached to an equally dignified owner. “His name is Frederick,” Stephen whispers. “And he really wants to take a shit. Right now.”

“Which one?” Jon giggles. “The dog, or the –”

“Don’t be stupid.” The whisper is harsh. “The man, of course.”

They walk away and Jon knows the man knows, but he’s allowed not to care, because Stephen is next to him and already eying a prissy Pomeranian.

“Phillip secretly likes cat food.”

“Thomas hates the smell of other dog’s asses, but doesn’t want to be a social pariah.”

“Suzie is a lesbian.”

This must be it, thinks Jon. This must be it. Bittersweet: /bittersweet/. Adjective.

\---

You’re not religious, but sometimes when you’re washing your face or brushing your teeth or whatever in the mirror, you think that when you turn back around, you’re going to see another head grinning back at you over your shoulder, like one of those horrible demon masks, eyes rolling in the back of your head, teeth bared. But really all you see is your own face. It always works a wry, twisted smile out of you. Really, you think. That’s enough symbolism for one evening.

\---

Stephen stops him one day before practice before the Lynam affair. “Look, my house is free this weekend. I took the liberty of getting you this.” He whips out an envelope from his jacket pocket. Inside is a flimsy sheet of paper that says “Montclair. One way.”

“A train ticket?” Jon asks dubiously. “To your house?”

“Yes,” Stephen says. “You should come over before we graduate.”

It becomes a joke.

“Are you planning on graduating? Because you haven’t come over yet.”

“So, were you waiting for a train ticket, or something?”

And so on, and so forth. Stephen wears his jokes like a cloak and his smile is the dagger. Et tu, Brutus?

\---

To be quite honest, you didn’t even realize you were counting the number of flounder bodies yourself until Jon says the word “hypocrisy” in class. When you turn around, the monster is there, sitting in its own shit, happily gnawing at the skeleton of a most definitely flat fish. Its eyes are on the floor, and there seem to be two yawning caverns on just the one side of the spine.

It encourages you to unlock the cage for once. To allow the darkness to settle over your body, almost tenderly. You’re consumed with your illness, it feels natural, it feels like plastic rhinestones stuck to a piece of a pizza box as a tiara. Your entire being is soaked with hopelessness and dread.

Your words are spears. As you delve into the pile of flounders, you entrench yourself ever more deeply into the sand, your two eyes poking out, looking for prey, holding a one-way train ticket like a Bram Stoker wears a stake or maybe the way the Pope carries a crucifix.

Despair. You think it would make quite a nice name were it not for pesky implications.

\---

Does everybody know? Is it obvious? Is my smile in place like a demon like a student like a person who knows happiness?

Am I going to feel, today?

\---

You get into college and would have shredded the acceptance letter were it not for your mother’s staying hand. She envelopes you in a giant hug and congratulates you. If there were a worse feeling in the world, you’d sure like to know it, because you’re standing in the kitchen with the woman who thinks she loves you holding an off-white piece of paper with just a few words written on it and those words make all the difference.

But you don’t deserve that difference, Leiboshits.

How can you feel anything when you’re just a slug a seabottom crawler flaking up sand faking up and –

You retreat to your room. What is there to celebrate? It’s strange that after struggling so much for people to like you, acceptance means nothing.

\---

In physics and chemistry, potential is energy potential. How much energy could this object yield? What is the potential energy of this reaction?

He’s started to see objects’ potential, but probably in a different way than Einstein intended. Wine glasses become transparent splinters clinging to his blood in the same way alcohol residue films the inner curves of the cup. The jagged edge of a key becomes a bloody imprint saying “I’m home”, twisting the metal into the flesh. Airplanes become nuclear bombs, cars become bulldozers and birthday candles become grenades. Open windows become gaps in the universe waiting for crushed vertebrae and loose teeth. How many atoms would I have to rearrange for this to kill me? How many particles would shift for this to have potential?

Jon was never good at science. Always asked the wrong questions.

\---

So when you find a real weapon in your father’s cabinet – a gun – you stare at it in shock for a few seconds, before carefully picking it up and running your hands over it. God, it’s gorgeous. Sinewy curves and a world of seductive coldness. It whispers metallic across your lips, and you push it by your lips in the same way you’d occasionally thought about Stephen’s dick, and in that moment the fault line you’d been working on disappears without a sound - silence.

Suddenly our muscles are seized with energy. “Run!” the gun shouts, and we sprint like the dead-end motherfucker we were fated to be. We run down empty streets burning with the afternoon, run away from the gape of the cabinet door with its brass lock and the box of condoms next to the loaded real weapon which is heavy in our hand with promise.

We run until all we can smell is kerosene gunpowder our own sweat and other flammable things.

“Stop,” I say. “Stop, I can’t run anymore.”

“Can’t take it?” the gun asks. “We have to keep going!”

So we keep running and running until we reach our mother’s house. And then we use the jagged key for the lock in the door and reach our room. The window is closed. We reach into your pocket out of habit and feel a dry slip of paper. One way to Montclair. There’s something in that that makes us laugh until the sound is hollow, and that doesn’t really take long.

\---

“Mr. Leibowitz? Is Jon there?”

“No, I haven’t seen him,” he says, absentmindedly closing his cabinet door. “He was supposed to come over this afternoon, but I came home late. Don’t think I missed him, though.”

Stephen breathes heavy over the phone. “Okay. Well, if you see him, please tell him to call. Sir,” he adds.

“Not a problem, Colbert.” He says the hard ‘t’ like he’s spitting. “Bye.”

“Bye.”

\---

What’re you going to be when you grow up?

What’re you going to do?

What’re you going to be?

 

Like you know. Like you know where you’re going to be in ten minutes, train ticket in one hand and gun in the other. In ten minutes you could be sitting sad-eyed in a steel box the dark window body filled with the cold syncopated metal heartbeat with other such eyed passengers, or in ten minutes you could be laying on the bed blood blossoming like your future across the off-white sheets your mom chose with shit and piss running down your legs. The sheets aren’t white – they’re off-white – which is very, very important, because that’s how you know we’re fucking civilized.

Where are you going?

What’s your plan?

How do you see your future?

Five minutes ago you were running and now you are sitting. You’re still chewing gum, a wad of tasteless mess of the gelatin of joints of other animals. You’re sitting in the middle of your object-filled room feeling like an object with no objective. Dispossessed and possessed all at once. You can’t find your iPod.

It starts with the carpet. It’s a neutral color, so that it won’t offend anybody who wants to rent the house. Nobody buys in the city; only rentals, like your hold on a red-blue heartbeat. Just a skin rental, just a joint-and-bone rental. You rented your mother’s uterus for something just short of nine months and now you’re settled in your room renting her worries and her fears for precisely nothing. It’s quite a good deal.

It builds up to the desk – real cherry wood, because what are you, a peasant? It’s filled with plastic you don’t need, because inside, you are a peasant. You are a worm. You are used toilet paper. You fill a proper cherry wood desk with plastic. There’s a fluorescent light above it that casts a green glow when your eyes are tired and you’re trying to work – churning out words of regurgitated knowledge, vomiting bile black across a cursor and hoping some of it sticks as your throat turns dry from the contents of your stomach.

Then the Ikea cabinet painted with the fucking red and white flowers. Also filled with things you don’t need, only reversed – paper breathing with uselessness, files heaving with pointlessness. Who cares what you know? Who cares what you think you know? Who gives a flying fuck? The truth is only in your own head and nobody else is ever going to see the racetrack running on the inside of your eyes. No-one else will ever run those four hundred meters, coming in last to nobody as you have always done your entire life.

Then the mirror, glazed with vanity. The textured wallpaper. The stupid clothes in your closet. The junk that’s accumulated in layers across the neutral carpet and cherry-wood desk, in cabinets and fake-wood bookshelves and rugged backpacks like so many layers of the earth, from the core all the way up filled with fossils of your life until you hit asphalt. Memories frozen underneath all that. You try to clean but you can’t really. Not until your insides are turned inside out and scrubbed with acid, and you’re burning with freshness. Until you’ve cleaned your retina with the hydrogen peroxide Mrs. Lynam was drinking so you see the world anew, your room will stay the same stale garbage dump it’s been destined to be since before you were even a fetus, zygote, cell, idea. There’s also a prayer book sitting on your desk, but that’s like customer service – always on hold.

As any other animal, you should be reduced to your basic functions: breathing, eating, shitting, sleeping. Only you don’t sleep and the ceiling above you tempts with shadowed darkness. You don’t eat because food is not what you’re hungry for. You don’t even shit sometimes. You certainly breathe but thank God you’re not a dolphin.

What would it be like to look down on an empty bed? Would you look down from a clouded heaven or a rain-glossed purgatory? Or would the roots of the earth be transparent as you looked up from a magma hell?

Run four hundred. Come in first even if you’re breathing in a kerosene flame.

The ticket is crumpled in your hand and it looks like our face. One-way indeed - the gun is cold in our hand. But the fault line returns as you look up and see Stephen’s face over your shoulder in the reflection in the window. Just one electric pulse to contract the muscle to send your animal corpse back to the tilted Earth...

Yet. Today, you’re a coward. You make the choice to surface to breathe. You stop just short of the finish line yet somehow you've won the race.

There is no “we”, and the fault line returns. Just look outside your window as the sky lowers its lashes shyly, fluttering with orange until twilight curves over, arcing like your mother’s spine. You can hear the train’s rattling breath in the distance. A breeze comes through the netted screen, smaller than a mosquito, larger than a cell. Are you alive? Are you living? Two separate questions that you don’t know how to answer, and never will.

\---

So.

So indeed.

This is how Stephen finds you one afternoon. He took the train up instead of how it was meant to be.

Don’t fucking tell me. Don’t you ever. Don’t you ever fucking.

It just sounds like Stephen wants you to be a virgin forever.

“Stephen,” you say. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” Jon says. “This is how I feel. I don’t mean to hurt you. Lay here with me. I feel alone.” The monosyllables are more eloquent than anything.

“What’re you listening to?” Stephen says quietly, adjusting himself around Jon’s body and breathing.

You let out a sharp, short laugh. “The second movement of a Beethoven piano sonata. Number eight.”

“Never took you for a classical music buff,” Stephen murmurs, and you interrupt, saying:

“It’s called ‘Pathetique’. It’s perfect for me.”

“I wish you would stop.” Stephen’s voice croaks with the previous effort of shouting.

“I’m sorry,” Jon says immediately, and lets his leg dangle over the side of the bed, and his foot connects with cold metal. It clicks. Stephen looks over. Jon would have had a good laugh over his expression in any other case.

“Is that a –”

“Yes.”

“Were you –?”

“I don’t know.” Fuck it.

Stephen looks at Jon then. Truly sees him. Haggard. Eighteen with the weight of an entire world bursting out of his lips chapped with worn insecurity and empty eyes. They’re like can tabs, two punched holes and dull aluminum. “How close?”

“Too close. Too fucking close.”

“How close?” The whisper is morbid.

“There’s gunpowder in my mouth,” you confess. “I can taste it.”

Stephen looks at you. Sees your eyes like the reverse side of a dome, reflecting light away with the snag of your grin. “Stop.”

“I wish I could,” Jon says. It’s not so much feeling as it is fleeing.

“I love you,” Stephen says. It’s not so much hollow as a hollow-point. Fifty caliber to your father’s gun’s twenty-two.

Love. /love/. Noun, verb.

“Don’t be stupid,” you scoff.

Stephen stays silent.

This silence is strange. It’s not your mother’s when the darkness won’t form on her tongue, and it’s not like your own when you’re seething in the hot warm quick embrace of the monster. You poke out your forked tongue to taste the air.

“You’re not weak,” Stephen says finally, and you feel a bit let down.

“Don’t be stupid.”

“Don’t be stupid.”

“This is stupid.”

“You’re being stupid.”

“No, you –”

“Jon. Jon, Jon, Jon.” He says it like a mantra. Like a soothsayer. Like a therapist like a priest like a teacher like a president like a drug addict like a father. “Come back, Jon.”

You feel the fault line shift. There’s a small earthquake, and you’re losing your grip even as Stephen’s hands grip Jon’s arms. “Come back.”

“I’m sick. I’m really sick. I’m -” Jon closes his eyes and swallows the fireworks bursting on his tongue like little words he dare not say. “There are pieces missing. I’m not whole.”

“No,” Stephen agrees. “But I’m not buying a jigsaw puzzle. I’m looking for my – friend.”

“I can’t remember joy anymore.”

There is another still quiet. This one is unreadable and deliberate. Stephen’s hand finds Jon’s, the story in the palms of their hands, rough with thousands of words across a grid, finally meeting.

“Well, maybe…if you’re willing…maybe I can help you remember.”

The monster rattles its bars and draws a rasping breath as Stephen’s slow smile takes your breath away. Jon inhales.

For the first time in a long time, you don’t answer for Jon.

“I’m willing,” he says.

And this is the real beginning.


End file.
